“Go local” is the new mantra for any services to capture a huge share in the multi lingual Indian market. Google understands this concept very well and have already started the process of availing its services in local languages. Few months back, Google has introduced Hindi transliteration feature in Blogger, its popular blogger service and last month, Indic On-Screen Keyboard iGoogle Gadgets and Indic transliteration tool were introduced as part of the launch of Google labs India.

Now they have came up with Orkut localiztion. Yes, Orkut, the most popular social networking site in India now has interfaces in 5 popular indian languages. The languages includes Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali and Telugu. To Switch your orkut page to your preferred language is a two minute process and very simple.

1. Click the settings button under your profile photo (or click the blue settings link at the top of any page).
2. On the general tab, choose your preferred display language from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
3. Click save changes.

Hope Orkut team will include the Indic language transliteration feature in the Orkut, which would help us to Scrap in the local language. Also currently, even though one can localize his/her Orkut page, his/her profile page will still remain in English. So an option for the user like “Display my profile in XYZ language” will be a good move, so that users who would like to display their profiles in their favorite languages can use it.

As of now, Translation is only half done and some of the translations are really funny. Lots of translation mistakes are also scattered across.

Bottomline: Going regional is a smart move considering the usage of other social networking platforms like Blogs, Wiki in regional languages